It happened again on Wednesday evening. I was returning from a work appointment. There were pretty houses and a primary school along the bus route between the station and my road. I was enjoying my walk. Out of the twilight came a young man's voice, "Awright, gaw-jusssss?" I turned and saw that he had a silent friend with him. He followed it up with "Y'alright?" in a snickering voice. I told him off, leaving him squeaking with outraged hate. Earlier that day I watched in alarm as a twentysomething guy in a sports car swerved sharply onto the pavement, yelling obscenities at a group of schoolgirls coming home from school. They shouted out in shock as he jerked away and sped off, his face shining with delight. The previous day a dust-covered mega-truck pulled up to the crossing. The driver noticed the woman in front of me and beeped at her, two quick blasts. She ignored it. He beeped again, sharper. No reaction. He stuck his head out and emitted a long, loud, low, mocking wolf-whistle. She ducked her head and cringed. He looked ecstatic: another woman successfully baited.

All this occurred in an area that is almost comically pretty, quiet, safe and family friendly. Maybe it's constructed upon ancient ley-lines that inexorably attract harassers, but I don't think so. When I lived in central London, the baiting was just the same. I wrote an article about it a year ago and the response was astounding. Hundreds of women wrote in from all over the world. The stories were always the same, regardless of the country's culture or the victim's age, job, location or appearance. I also received a significant number of lovely emails from concerned boyfriends, male friends, husbands and parents.

I can announce that in the past year, nothing has changed. Here's five consecutive days from August: I was galumphing along when a man I passed started gyrating, staring at my body and shouting, "Oh, baby, baby, baby". I stopped and phoned my friend (he was about to walk past her house). He too stopped, got out his phone and began mimicking my actions, watching me closely. When I gestured for him to get lost, he copied, laughing. The next day a builder walked close behind a petite young woman and gave two sharp, mocking whistles right in her ear before swerving away, smiling to himself. She jumped and cringed. At the crossing a man barged up to a woman, leered at her and shouted "Hello!" mockingly into her face. She stared after him, open-mouthed, while he strode on gleefully. On Holloway Road, the woman in front of me was beeped by one, then two, then three passing cars. In all of these incidents, the women looked outraged and the men grinned openly with pleasure.

This endemic harassment of women is verbal rape. When a male intentionally breaks into a woman's peace of mind and violates her space, when he perpetrates the act to enjoy her chagrin and discomfort, his psychological processes are the same as any rapist. I have never witnessed a case in which the woman appeared to enjoy it, encourage it or even be unaffected by it. I remember one New Year's Eve in a restaurant. A group of teenage girls had been followed in and were being harangued by a gang of boys. The girls' faces were tight with discomfort and one of them entreated the boys in agony, "Is this really how you want to spend your night? Following us?" It made no difference.

It has become a rhetorical nicety to say that the majority of men respect women and that all abuse is perpetrated by a minority. I do not believe this. I believe that the majority of people of both sexes hate women; a state that is counteracted by a significant minority of progressive women and men. Without majority support, and without some conveniently internalised female misogyny, the status quo could not continue. We live in a country in which domestic violence is the single biggest killer of women, in which rape is rife and practically legal, in which there is a massive pay gap, in which women of childbearing age are the largest group to be discriminated against in the workplace and in which the glass ceiling has recently been described as "reinforced with concrete". Yet any woman who points out that misogyny is the world's driving force is ripped down in a way that is itself transparently misogynistic.

We women are not a recent invention, a special case or a minority. We are the single largest group in the world; we do the vast majority of all its drudge work and receive the vast majority of all its exploitation, stigmatisation, slander, abuse, harassment and violence. It's pathetic. All men have to do is treat women with respect, and they can't even do that.